Richard J. wrote:
([1] The point here is that in the absence of staff at the
destination, the only way to pay is to purchase a ticket from the
machine for the reverse journey, which would not have been valid for
the actual journey undertaken, and is therefore technically a
donation.)

And indeed that reverse-journey purchase simply serves to skew London
Transport's statistics, since they will think an artificially high number of
people are making the B to A journey when they're not; presumably they will
then concentrate on providing extra staff at B since this is - to them -
where all the tickets seem to be being bought, and ultimately removing even
more staff hours from station A, which was the short staffed one in the
first place.

OK I accept that the above is tenuous and taking things to extreme, but just
demonstrating that the "everyone who doesn't pay even when LU can't be
bothered to let them pay" brigade are technically making the issue worse.

To take another example, if you inadvertently overrun by 5 minutes the
paid-for time at a parking meter, do you regard that as the theft of
the extra 20p or whatever? If so, how do you proceed? Or like most
people, do you just drive away relieved that you've got away with it?
I'm just trying to explore how absolute your view of theft is.

Precisely. Sometimes life gives you these breaks and it's only natural to
take them.